[para]virtualisation without pain

Authors

Peter Chubb, Matthew Chapman and Myrto Zehnder

    School of Computer Science and Engineering
    University of New South Wales
    Sydney 2052 Australia
    
    NICTA, Sydney, Australia

Abstract

There's been a lot of hoohah recently about adding virtualisation interfaces to Linux. That something needs to be done is agreed... but what?

The Xen port to IA64 needs around 2000 changed or new lines of code. Is that all necessary? Probably not. We (UNSW and the University of Kahlsruhe) have been working together on a technique known as `afterburning' which drastically reduces the engineering effort involved in paravirtualising Linux (or FreeBSD, or any other open-source OS). For example, using this technique leads to around 20 lines of changed code, and 100 lines of new code to provide a paravirtualised Linux for Itanium that outperforms the manually paravirtualised Xen for some benchmarks.

We used the same technique to use Linux itself as a hypervisor. This talk will explain some of the performance hacks necessary to make this work.

BibTeX Entry

  @inproceedings{Chubb_CZ_07,
    oldlabel         = {Chubb_Chapman_Zehnder_07},
    title            = {[Para]virtualisation without pain},
    booktitle        = {8th Linux.conf.au},
    author           = {Peter Chubb and Matthew Chapman and Myrto Zehnder},
    year             = {2007},
    month            = {Jan},
    note             = {Annotated slides},
    address          = {Sydney, NSW}
  }

Download

• Chubb_CZ_07.pdf